The conventional portable computing device, such as laptop computer, a PDA, or a wireless telephone, includes a LCD display for presenting information to the user, and a keyboard or keypad for facilitating data entry by the user. The LCD display might be a transmissive LCD panel, a reflective LCD panel or a transreflective LCD panel, and might be sourced from any of a number of different manufacturers.
Each make and model of LCD panel typically has its own particular instructions set and signal timing characteristics. As such, the portable computing device manufacturer must maintain a number of device drivers for all of the LCD panels that the manufacturer might use during fabrication of the portable computing device. Further, during the fabrication process, technicians must manually identify the make and model of the LCD panel, and then configure the portable computing device with the correct device driver. Alternately, the manufacturer must ensure that the correct device driver for the LCD panel will be loaded onto the computing device. This method of manufacture is time consuming, error prone and labour intensive, and therefore, also increases the manufacturing cost of the portable computing device.
Therefore, there is a need for a method of manufacturing a portable computing device in which the manufacturer may select from one of a number of functionally-similar hardware components (eg. LCD panels) at any given time in the assembly process, but which may have different instruction set and/or signal timing characteristics.